


Standard Deviation

by aetataureate



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: College, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Pre-Canon, math nerds, oh my god they were roommates, strangers to rivals to friends to lovers back to enemies to be specific
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2019-11-21 18:41:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18145964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aetataureate/pseuds/aetataureate
Summary: “Who isthat?” asked Tracy. Tracy was May’s least favorite of her orientation friends. She was hoping that Charlie, Lindsey, and Ben agreed, and that they would start doing things without Tracy soon, but she did not know everyone well enough yet to judge whether that suggestion would be well-received.“It’s my roommate,” May said. “Olivia.”“I am so sorry,” said Tracy. “What is she evenwearing.” Olivia was wearing the same thing she was always wearing, which was a pair of ratty jeans with holes in the knees, heavy combat boots, a t-shirt with an obscure logo, and a leather jacket covered with even more obscure pins. It was a terrible outfit for the warm months. The dining hall was a large, airy room, with ceiling fans on long supports suspended from the high rafters, but it wasn’t air-conditioned, and Olivia was visibly sweating as she picked her way down the aisle towards the condiment bar.“I really don’t think what she’s wearing is her biggest problem,” May said, absently, watching Olivia absolutely obliterate the hot dog on her tray with a barrage of condiments.





	1. a girl who spilled some numbers

May Reilly and her mother packed for college extremely carefully. They went through her tiny closet with the aim of donating one-third of her clothing. The task had the triple purpose of creating more space for May’s little sister June to move in to the bigger room in the fall, getting rid of anything dingy, ill-fitting, or simply too high school, and providing for New York’s homeless. The rest of May’s wardrobe was neatly folded away in the sturdy luggage set her father had purchased and gifted to her for her eighteenth birthday, his mustache twitching slightly, a single tear threatening at the corner of his eye. The bulkier items—bedding, spare sheets, winter coat—were stored in a trunk that fit neatly under the beds native to the dorms of King’s College. Her mother added potpourri, bundled up tightly in the spare fabric from the decorative pillowcases she had sewn in the week leading up to May’s departure. Her husband had suggested the project as a form of stress relief, concerned his wife might take drastic action, such as adopting a dog or a needy child. May now had pillowcases, curtains, chair cushions, and a new sundress. May’s father had a dog.

May’s roommate had packed by herself, and it showed.

“It smells like a dog rolled in shit and wandered into the perfume department at J.C. Penny’s,” Olivia said, throwing her duffel bag on the floor. Several things clanked loudly. May eyed the bag. It was one of those scuffed-up green ones that, left alone on a subway platform, would probably merit immediately flagging down the nearest police officer.

“I don’t smell anything like that,” said May, who had already privately admitted that the potpourri had permeated more deeply into the duvet than either she or her mother had anticipated. They had made her bed and hung the curtains immediately upon arriving at Mallorn Hall, and the smell was overwhelming. Her mother, teary-eyed, hadn’t seemed to notice, but May was relieved when June (fifteen, too cool and adult for feelings) and her father (mustache quivering alarmingly, still unwilling to miss the baseball game) vetoed the plan to wait around for Olivia (name posted on the door in script so obscured by curlicues as to require a family-wide effort at decryption) in order to introduce themselves to the Octaviuses and ensure the girls were settled in. May forced open the creaky window as soon as her parents were down the hall, ignoring her mother’s dire warnings and father’s subtle placement of newspaper articles about crime on college campuses by her seat at the breakfast table.

“Do you have, like, nose blindness?” Olivia demanded. “It smells like someone emptied a dumpster inside a Yankee Candle.”

May blinked. She had mentally rehearsed meeting her freshman year roommate, who, according to the books about college she had read and her two-years-older friend Sarah, would be her dining hall buddy, her receptacle of late-night confidences, and the Lewis to her Clark as they navigated campus. Nose blindness had not factored into her rehearsals. “I’m May Reilly. I don’t have nose blindness,” she said, improvising.

“I read the door,” said Olivia. “God, it must be coming from outside.” She went over to the window and hauled in shut with a single, powerful turn of the crank, which May was immediately resentful of.

“I loosened it for you,” said May.

“What?”

“The— nothing.” Olivia had sat down in the middle of the floor and begun to pull off her heavy boots, which released a different, also-bad smell. “Are your parents coming with the rest of your stuff?”

“What stuff?” Olivia asked. “God, that’s better. I was on that bus for fucking seventeen fucking hours.”

“Seventeen _hours_?” said May. She had lived in Queens her whole life, and was plenty familiar with the bus, but she couldn’t imagine what would compel a person to ride one for seventeen hours. She tried to think of somewhere the appropriate distance away. “What are you, from Nebraska or something?”

“I’m _from_ California,” said Olivia. “I just had to be in Georgia for a while and so I took the bus from there.”

“Oh, okay,” said May, who didn’t have strong feelings either way about Georgia.

“I’m not _from_ there. I’m from California.”

“Neat.”

“I’m going to bed,” Olivia announced abruptly, and stood up. May, who kept needing to pull her trunk halfway out from under the bed for use as a stepping stool, was struck suddenly by how tall she was. She had a lot of hair that went everywhere, and it made her seem even taller.

To May’s continued astonishment, Olivia undid the closure on her bag and, with magician-like flair, pulled out a ratty sleeping bag. This was followed in short order by a fitted sheet, which she laid across her mattress without actually pulling it over the corners. Olivia then removed a flattened pillow from the sleeping bag and tossed both on top of the sheet.

“There are probably so many sex germs on that mattress,” she said, gleefully, before turning back to rummage through her bag. There were more clinking noises, and she removed a plastic bag before drifting off to the bathroom that connected May-and-Olivia to Jennifer-and-Paige. May followed behind, a small fish caught in the eddy of a speedboat.

“I talked to Jennifer and Paige, they share the bathroom with us? And like, they seem super nice.” Olivia had dumped her toiletries across the counter, and seemed to generate more toothpaste through the act of brushing than most people did. “They both are on swim and dive—all of swim and dive is in this hall actually, the girls are on even floors and the guys are on odd? And they have morning workouts so we were thinking they could shower in the mornings and we could do the evenings and that would. Make sense mostly. The most sense.”

Olivia spat vehemently into the sink. “Swim and dive?”

“Jennifer is swim and Paige is dive. Or, maybe it’s the opposite?”

“Okay,” said Olivia, and shut the door. May stood awkwardly for a moment, until she realized she was basically listening to her roommate pee for no reason and went back to sit at her desk, staring at her word processor, pencil cup, Post-it notes, and desk lamp, all laid out at neat right angles. The toilet flushed. The sink ran. Olivia emerged.

“Do you want first shower or should I…?” May asked, and instead of responding Olivia pulled her jacket off and tossed it on the floor, where it was promptly joined by her pants. May squeaked. Olivia glared. She did not shave her legs, apparently. 

Olivia climbed up onto the bed and shimmied into the sleeping bag. It clearly originally belonged to a child, and her long torso stuck out comically far. After a brief and fruitless struggle, she rolled away to face the wall.

“Well,” said May. Olivia was silent. “Good night,” she finished, flipped off the desk light.

Twenty minutes later, both girls were lying still, neither one asleep. The quiet was pierced occasionally by the whoops of freshly unsupervised teenage boys on the floors above and below. After one such occurrence, Olivia sighed and rolled onto her back.

“The smell is worse,” she said.

“Yeah,” said May, and got up to open the window again.

***

May was sitting in the dining hall with Tracy, Charlie, Lindsey, and Ben, whom she had met during the small group introductions at orientation and liked fine, thus proceeding to join their default clique at mealtimes. She saw Olivia from across the long table. It was the first time she had seen her roommate outside of their shared room, and she waved tentatively. Olivia did not wave back.

“Who is _that_?” asked Tracy. Tracy was May’s least favorite of her orientation friends. She was hoping that Charlie, Lindsey, and Ben agreed, and that they would start doing things without Tracy soon, but she did not know everyone well enough yet to judge whether that suggestion would be well-received.

“It’s my roommate,” May said. “Olivia.”

“I am so sorry,” said Tracy. “What is she even _wearing_.” Olivia was wearing the same thing she was always wearing, which was a pair of ratty jeans with holes in the knees, heavy combat boots, a t-shirt with an obscure logo, and a leather jacket covered with even more obscure pins. It was a terrible outfit for the warm months. The dining hall was a large, airy room, with ceiling fans on long supports suspended from the high rafters, but it wasn’t air-conditioned, and Olivia was visibly sweating as she picked her way down the aisle towards the condiment bar.

“I really don’t think what she’s wearing is her biggest problem,” May said, absently, watching Olivia absolutely obliterate the hot dog on her tray with a barrage of condiments.

“Ooh, spill,” said Lindsey. Lindsey’s gossip radar was extremely sensitive and not very specific. She kept a running tab of all her classmates likely to be sleeping a professor, which included every girl over a B cup who had been to office hours already, and she had only been right maybe one time so far.

“It’s not like she has a _problem_ problem,” May clarified. “She’s just. Intense, I think?”

“ _You’re_ intense,” Charlie told her. “How intense is she?”

“I’m not intense, I’m _serious_ ,” said May. “I don’t know, she— you know how we’re all taking A Whole And Balanced Life?” A Whole And Balanced Life was a mandatory and utterly useless course for freshmen, which was designed to reinforce the importance of having hobbies and interests outside of the rigorous academic environment at King’s College. It accomplished this through a series of classroom lectures and eight-page essays on the importance of life outside the academic environment.

“Yeah, did she not turn in that Sports, Sportsmanship, and the Power of Team Athletics paper?”

“No, she’s not even taking the class.”

Ben’s head shot up so fast he choked on his mozzarella stick. “ _How_? Can she show me?”

“It’s not worth it, she has to take it next year still. But she showed up at the registrar’s office every day for like, three weeks to make her case. Said it was a waste of her time.”

“It’s a waste of everyone’s time,” Charlie pointed out.

“I know! But she felt so strongly about it that the assistant registrar just gave up. Told her she could validate it if she got the head RA in our hall to sign a thing that says she’s attained a whole and balanced life on her own, but otherwise she has to take it next year, with _next_ year’s freshmen. But Olivia’s in like seven classes, and now our RA comes by all the time, so she has to shove all her problem sets into her desk drawer and pretend to be on her way to clarinet practice or something. She doesn’t even have a clarinet.”

“This explains so much about your room,” Lindsey said thoughtfully.

“Do _tell_ ,” said Tracy.

“My room is fine,” May said, silently willing Lindsey to drop it.

“No it’s not, May, it’s weird. It’s like one side was decorated by College Barbie—no offense, girl, I love your bedspread, but it’s very pink—and the other roommate just got released from the gulag. She has a sleeping bag just like, sitting on the mattress,” Lindsey told Tracy conspiratorially.

“ _Gross_.”

“There’s a fitted sheet,” May said feebly.

“Even the bathroom is weird,” Lindsey continued. “It’s so obvious what’s Olivia’s. Like— normal towel, normal towel, normal towel, stolen gym towel. May’s shower caddy, Jennifer’s shower caddy, Paige’s shower caddy, Olivia’s plastic bag from Walmart.”

“She’s probably here on _scholarship_ ,” Tracy said, archly.

“I’m here on scholarship,” Ben said mildly, and the topic of Olivia was put immediately to rest.

When May got up to scrape the remains of her chicken quesadilla into the garbage (it had been okay, since it was a quesadilla, but May suspected any food more complicated than a quesadilla would be somewhat iffy) and deposited her tray and utensils onto a conveyor belt that carried dishes back into the kitchen with the air of mystery usually reserved for airport luggage conveyor belts, Ben came with her.

“You know,” he said, letting the rice pudding ooze off his plate and fall into the trash can with a solid _glop_ , “there’s a show about Spacelab at the Hayden Planetarium this weekend, and the student office is selling discounted tickets. You wanna get off campus, maybe check it out? See the Natural History Museum too?”

“Sure,” said May, who had seen that museum dozens if not hundreds of times, but desperately wanted to get off campus for a while. “I can write about it for that Emotions, Locations, the City, and You paper.” Then, reflexively: “Plus, my boyfriend won’t be in town until next weekend.”

“I know Noah,” said Ben. “We met over Labor Day, remember? Seems like a cool guy.” May laughed, slightly embarrassed with herself.

“Yeah, he is. A cool guy.”

“Can I tell you something?” asked Ben, and May nodded. “I was going to ask you and Charlie and Lindsey individually because, well,” and he lowered his voice so far it nearly disappeared under the sound of the freshman crew team, which had just walked through the door in its entirety, “I don’t really want Tracy to come.” 

***

May came through the door one afternoon in December to find the space in front of her desk occupied by her roommate, who was positively vibrating with rage.

“What do you think you’re _doing_ ,” Olivia said. She was peering very hard at the piece of paper May had taped carefully up on the wall beside her desk, underneath the map of campus and over her assemblage of Post-it note to-dos.

“Uh, taking my coat off?” said May, shaking the snow out of her hair before it could melt.

“No, why are you in PH256 _and_ MA394 next semester?” Olivia demanded. “Those are my classes, why are you taking my classes.”

“They’re not yours, they’re for my major,” May said. “They’re literally required. Why would I take your classes?” She came around to peer over Olivia’s shoulder at her schedule for the next semester, but the course numbers all seemed to be in order.

“No,” Olivia insisted. “You need to tell the registrar you made a mistake. Your major is like, French Literature or some shit. Sociology. Is it Philosophy? PH is for _Phy_ sics, not Philosophy. Go back and tell them to undo it.”

“Uh, I would,” said May, “but my major is _phy_ sics, so that would be counterproductive.”

Olivia whirled around to look at her. “Stop it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Stop it. Stop it. Why are you trying to ruin my life?”

“Why would I try to ruin your life?” May said, baffled and a little angry. Olivia was nearly shouting.

“Are you stalking me? MA394 is a nuclear engineering req, why are you taking nuclear engineering reqs?” 

“Stalking you? We live together. MA394 is a _mechanical_ engineering req.”

“Aha! But you said you’re a physics major!” Olivia brandished her finger wildly in May’s face, which was almost intimidating because of how tall she was, but wasn’t, because of how irritated May was.

“Physics is my _first_ major,” said May, “which you would _know_ , if you literally asked me anything about my life ever under any circumstances, instead of like, spending all of your time either pretending I don’t exist or _monologuing_ at me!”

“I don’t _monologue_!” yelled Olivia, who had been muttering about intermediate vector bosons for fifteen minutes before May went to shower two nights ago, and when she came out twenty minutes later had moved on to light neutrinos. “And you can’t double major! Literally all of your credits last semester were bullshit, it’ll take you at least five years to graduate. Maybe six. You don’t have any of the fall-only 100-level prereqs.”

“My credits last semester were _core courses_ ,” May said, “and I didn’t take the fall prereqs because I got college credit for them in high school, which means I will graduate exactly on time.” _You raging bitch!_ , she did not add. Olivia looked apoplectic. Her face was turning red, and her mouth was twisting up into an ugly kind of expression that May didn’t have a word for. Olivia, May had noticed, always had her emotions hanging off of her. In the whole time May had known her, she had never seemed to push anything back down under the surface.

“You always need to have everything!” Olivia said, dragging her hands through her tangle of hair, then turned around and kicked her desk chair.

“What in the world,” May said.

“You can’t just— you can’t just join a fucking sorority with fucking Jennifer and Paige? You can’t just let me have this one thing?”

“What are you _talking_ about?” May said. “Jennifer and Paige aren’t in a sorority.” Jennifer and Paige were in fact not speaking to one another, and hadn’t been since before midterms. It was making things very awkward on swim and dive, as both Jennifer and Paige had told her independently when the other was out.

“But they _should_ be,” Olivia said. “They look it. Is your boyfriend even going to let you double major?”

“Noah,” May said, “doesn’t _get_ an opinion on what my major is, but if he did, he would be supportive of my goals.”

“What, it’s not going to get in the way of all that time you need to spend twirling your hair and learning to ice skate? Packing picnic fucking lunches?”

“The ice skating is— actually, no. I don’t even know what you’re fighting with me about.”

“Your idiot friends are in here all the time being super loud, and your boyfriend thinks it’s okay to stop by on freaking Sunday mornings, and I have to look at these fucking _flowery curtains_ every day, and now you want to be in all my classes? You and your credits from your fancy fucking high school are going to waltz right in? You didn’t do any fucking work this whole semester, and now you can’t just _leave me alone_?”

“Fine,” said May, “I’m leaving you alone,” and stormed off to see whether Lindsey had any extra space for her to sleep.


	2. a normal sort of silence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’re my literal sworn enemy,” said Olivia. “I’m swearing it.”
> 
> “Me?” asked Silvio.
> 
> “Not _you_ ,” Olivia said, stomping away. May sighed. 
> 
> “She means me,” she told him.

May spotted Olivia shouting into a payphone on her way to the physics building. At some point, she had obtained fingerless gloves and a beanie, but her outfit was otherwise unchanged from the warm months. Her beanie didn’t even fit past all of her hair to cover her ears—she looked shaking mad, but maybe she was just cold. May did a wide loop through the February slush to avoid her.

When she reached the lecture hall, May began the process of unwrapping herself from her own hat-scarf-gloves-overcoat-sweater situation, squinting across to the chalkboard while she did so. TEST RESULTS was written across the the top of the lowest board, followed by handwriting far too neat to belong to Professor Stasinopoulos. May skimmed past the maximum and minimum, idly wondering what she should be hoping for, given a median of 72, but a mean of 68.487 with a standard deviation of 13.567. It all felt like slightly more information than she wanted or needed. Professor Stasinopoulos cleared his throat, and May settled in, pulling out her planner, notebook, and second-best pen.

“Good morning,” he began, his tweed and bow tie looking particularly grandfatherly. “As you can see, the TAs have finished grading Exam 1, which they’ll be handing back at the end of class. In the meantime, feel free to congratulate Miss May Reilly on receiving the high score.” Stasinopoulos smiled warmly at her, but the feeling of satisfaction settling tentatively in her gut was interrupted by a door slamming open in the back of the room. Everyone— _everyone_ —turned to look, and May slid down low in her seat, horrified.

Olivia was in the doorway, looking windblown and frostbitten and pale-furious. The only accessible seats remaining were in the front row, so she stomped down the aisle, glaring at everyone but May. How was she so _loud_ , May thought desperately. She must have been the loudest woman in the world—it was a wonder anyone could pay attention to anything else. Olivia punctuated this thought by slamming her notebook down on a desk.

“Settle down, please,” Stasinopoulos continued serenely, “and let’s all remember the late-arrival policy. Now, Ampère's law…”

May was unable to afford Ampère's law the attention it deserved, given that her roommate wouldn’t sit still and listen like a normal person. She started by pulling out her pocket calculator—from her actual pocket, the woman didn’t even carry a backpack—and furiously tapping at it while glowering at the chalkboard. May could hear the clicking of the keys from her seat in the center of the lecture hall. Then she started taking notes, and it was horrible—she ripped out pages from her spiral notebook, scrawling across them according to a system that would take a team of anthropologists to interpret. When she was finished with one, she shoved it back into the notebook at random and ripped out another, half-shredding it and causing May to jump. She looked down at her own notebook, where she was faithfully transcribing each equation that appeared on the board without actually processing it. Olivia wrote too hard, she decided. That was why her hand was always coated in pencil dust.

By the end of class, May was feeling what her father would describe as “rankled.” She was fairly certain she knew less about physics than she had when she walked through the door, and she wanted more than anything to go lie in her bed, turn on the radio, put a pillow over her face, and scream, except she couldn’t, because Olivia would be there. She resolved to drag Lindsey out to get hot chocolate instead.

“As the TAs hand back exams,” Stasinopoulos was saying, “I’m going to go over instructions for the final project. You’ll be working in teams of two for the rest of the semester, according to the— Silvio, did you hand out the— yes, thank you, the timeline on the rubric. Your project proposal is due Thursday after next. I’m available during regular office hours, and you can always schedule additional time with Silvio or Dirk. Now, your team assignments!” Stasinopoulos rolled up one of the chalkboards with a flourish to reveal a list of names.

A clamor of voices arose, and May was skimming over the list absently, thinking about hot chocolate, when she heard someone cry out over the noise. Her eyes cut automatically to her roommate. Olivia had her test paper crumpled in her hands, but she was staring at the board looking like she’d been stabbed. May’s stomach dropped, and she followed Olivia’s gaze to where her doom was spelled out in stern, implacable handwriting:

TEAM 23: OLIVIA OCTAVIUS, MAY REILLY

Before May could move an inch, Olivia was out of her chair and storming up to the lectern. She tripped over her own boots, nearly faceplanted, and righted herself in time to brandish a finger in Silvio’s face.

“You have to change the groups!” she shrieked, and every student still in the room immediately turned to the board to see who Olivia was paired with. May scrambled out of her seat and dashed towards her, hoping to stop the conversation or at least ensure it continued at a normal human volume.

“Uh,” said Silvio.

“This is not _acceptable_ ,” Olivia spat. “It’s— cruel and _unusual_ , I have _rights_ —”

“Uhhhhh,” said Silvio.

“What seems to be the problem, ladies?” Professor Stasinopoulos asked, having noticed the disruptive and undignified commotion happening directly in front of him. Olivia wheeled towards him.

“You can’t make me work with her,” Olivia said wildly. “It’s in the Fifth Amendment.” Stasinopoulos blinked, nonplussed, and turned to May.

“Miss Reilly? Are you attempting to coerce Miss Octavian into testifying against herself?”

“She means the Eighth— actually, no, the Constitution isn’t important. Well, it is. Well— Professor, Olivia and I are roommates, and what she’s trying to say is that we already spend a lot of time together, and in the spirit of, of, personal growth? We were hoping to branch out and… see other people.”

Stasinopoulos nodded along severely, but at the mention of roommates, his face lit up. “Oh, how lovely!” he exclaimed. “The two highest exam grades from the same room. Do you study together?”

“N… no,” May said, glancing at Olivia. She looked poleaxed by the idea that their roommate relationship could be termed “lovely.”

“Don’t worry about the rest of the class,” Stasinopoulos continued. “I would have probably had Silvio pair the two of you together even if your test scores weren’t adjacent—this is a long project, lots of late nights, _much_ more fitting for the young ladies to work together. And there aren’t many of you!” He chuckled, and May tamped down on the urge to pull an Olivia and throw a stapler at him. “And now, knowing you’re roommates, you’ll have a friend to walk with from the library at night. Lovely. I look forward to seeing your final project!” Stasinopoulos patted May on the shoulder, ignored Olivia entirely, and wandered off.

“You’re my literal sworn enemy,” said Olivia. “I’m swearing it.”

“Me?” asked Silvio.

“Not _you_ ,” Olivia said, stomping away. May sighed. 

“She means me,” she told him, and went to pack her things, feeling sick with nerves. She didn’t want hot chocolate anymore.

***

May scrambled into the room and lunged for her desk, backpack swinging like a counterweight. She got to the phone before its shrill ring cut off, fumbling it to her ear with a breathless “hello?”

“May,” Noah said. “I didn’t think you were going to answer.”

“No, I’m here,” May assured him, trying to sound more in control of her lungs than she actually was. “I heard the phone coming down the hall.”

“So you did forget.”

“No, I—”

“Because we talk at the same time every week, May.”

“No, I know, I was just out with friends, and we had to take the long way back from the—”

“Oh, you were out with _friends_. I see. Is that why you didn’t pick up last week, too?”

“No, my roommate unplugged my phone. My mom keeps calling me all the time, and she hates the ringing.”

“Well, I can’t fault Linda for that, since I’ve spent more time talking to her this month than I have you.” There was a horrible moment of dead air. “Anyway, I called you for a reason, you know.”

May shifted uncomfortably. She was still in her coat and backpack, the combination of bulk and weight cutting off her circulation. “Oh?” she asked.

“Our spring formal is in two weeks. You’re coming to that, right?”

“What day is it?”

“I mean, it’s like, a Saturday. Um—” May listened to him shuffle papers around, pictured him with those accordion folders he liked so much. “March 15th. I’m picking up tickets from the student union on Monday.”

“Wait,” said May, “I have a project draft due the 17th. For PH256?”

“Okay?” Noah said. “So you’re good for the 15th?”

“No, I mean, it’s in place of a midterm, it’s worth like 30% of our grade. I need the weekend to work on it.”

“You need the weekend,” Noah said. “For a _draft_.”

“I mean, we need to be in the lab to take final measurements— really, it’s more of a midterm—”

“Yeah, and last time, your problem set was more of a project. I have work to do too, you know, and I make the time—”

“You do,” May said, “and I appreciate that, I do. It’s just, this semester, it’s really important I do well in these foundational classes—”

“Why?” Noah said. He never raised his voice, and briefly, May hated him for it. “Why is it so important you do well in this class, but not so important you do well in this relationship?”

“Do _well_ in this _relationship_?” May asked, aghast.

“You heard what I said,” Noah said. “It’s, what, one transfer on the subway? You can’t do that because of a class? Sometimes, I wonder whether you understand what’s going to matter in the long run, May, I really do.”

May felt like her stomach had fallen out onto the floor. She pictured going to the formal—pictured going out with Jennifer or Paige to get a new dress and shoes, pictured wearing them in the subway while she waited for her transfer. She pictured leaning on Noah’s arm, wobbly like a newborn colt, while he talked to friends that she couldn’t tell apart. She pictured him asking her back to his dorm room and having to decide whether to say yes, or to walk in her dress and her shoes back to the train and take another transfer. She realized that her hand clutching the phone was shaking. “I said I can’t go,” she said, just as calm as he was. “I can’t go.”

“Are you sure it’s because of school?” he asked.

“What?”

“Which friends were you with today?”

“What are you asking?”

“Are you sure the reason you won’t come see me isn’t _Benjamin_?”

It was like he bodyslammed her back into the present, and the pressure difference caused all the blood in her brain to spontaneously boil. They were back on territory she understood, and it made her exquisitely angry. “I was with Lindsey and Tracy today,” she said, which was a lie, it was a goddamn lie, but how dare he take the way that Ben smiled at her, a commiserating smile for when Charlie and Lindsey were canoodling and Tracy was being a real bitch and she needed someone to be normal near her, and turn it into something ugly. “Not that it’s any of your business, because you of all people should know I would _never_.”

“Whoa, no need to get defensive,” said Noah, and she _hated_ him. “I’m just letting you know how it looks from a guy’s perspective.”

“I would _never_.”

“I know, Mayflower,” he crooned, and she wondered whether he actually thought he was placating her. “Listen, though, I have to go, Ken just got here. Let’s talk about this again later, okay? I’ll call you Tuesday.”

“I have lab Tuesday,” she said.

“Lab,” he repeated. “Okay. I’ll call you Wednesday.” There was a click, and the line went dead.

May replaced the receiver carefully, full of terrible energy and unsure what she was supposed to do with it. She turned around and lept a mile.

“Hey,” said Olivia from the doorway. She was eating something. From the bag, it seemed like popcorn; from the smell, it seemed like burnt popcorn.

“How long have you been standing there?” May asked, removing her hand from where she had placed it over her heart like a fainting grandmother. Olivia shrugged.

***

“She’s _fucking_ crazy,” Tracy said, leaning enthusiastically over her tray of Mexican-Style Beef Casserole. Tracy was never allowed to swear at home, but ever since she went to San Padre Island for spring break and met a wannabe cowboy with a foul mouth and not one single cow, she had taken to it with relish.

“She’s not crazy,” May said, pushing her Irish-Inspired Rice Pilaf around her plate with her fork.

“Um, she _fucking_ yelled at you? She threw your lab notebook in the trash? That’s some crazy _bullshit_.”

“It was both of our lab notebook,” May said, “and it’s not as bad as it sounds.” This was true—May didn’t need her friends’ help to deal with her roommate-slash-project-partner-slash-possible-nemesis situation. It was also, paradoxically, untrue—she had wanted to tell her friends about the crazy bullshit that was her two-hour morning lab block, but then she’d gotten to the part of the story where Silvio and Dirk decided they were in over their heads and called in Professor Stasinopoulos to deal with them, and May had almost cried right there in the materials lab, and her throat closed up in embarrassment. The upshot was that the real story was worse than what her friends heard, which was in turn worse than the version that lived inside May’s head.

Lindsey was making some kind of horrible sympathetic face in her direction. Charlie was looking at Lindsey and clearly not paying attention at all. Ben was sitting directly opposite her and gazing at her steadily over his pizza, probably because he was the only one of her friends smart and metabolically gifted enough to stick with the dining hall options that were literally just bread and cheese. “It just sucks that you have to spend so much time with someone you don’t like,” he said.

“I like Olivia,” said May.

“You what?” asked Ben.

“You complain about her all the time,” said Lindsey.

“I know _I_ don’t like _fucking Olivia_ ,” said Tracy.

May looked at each of them, surprised. Then she looked down at her tray. May didn’t think of herself as a person who disliked people. She was startled to hear that she seemed like she disliked Olivia, even though once she thought about it, she did devote a lot of mental consideration to how annoying and disruptive and distracting and _loud_ she was. Olivia was all of those things, but she was also driven, and dedicated, and almost as smart as May and catching up fast. She thought outside the box, and never said sorry, and would probably punch whatever friends she had in the teeth if they said May was crazy for caring that much about their project. All her weird things aside, Olivia was a serious person, and May didn’t _not_ like her. For a moment, she tried to parse whether that meant she _did_ like her. “I complain all the time?” she asked, finally.

“Constantly,” Lindsey said reassuringly.

“Just about this,” Ben told her.

“I don’t— Olivia is— she’s trying to become something, you know? Something it’s not easy to be. I don’t know, she’s got drive. I like her. I don’t think she likes where she came from, and she’s so _tall_ , and—” May paused on a half-formed thought about how tall Olivia was, and how much hair she had, and the way she moved her hands.

“You’re right,” said Tracy. “It’s probably hard to be that tall and gangly.”

Ben stood up abruptly. He was pretty tall and gangly himself. “I need a book,” he said. “I’m going to the library.”

“You and the fucking library, bro,” said Charlie. “Can I eat your crust?”

“Sure. May, you have recitation, right? Walk with me?”

Recitation didn’t start for another twenty-five minutes, but at the suggestion May was overcome by the urge to leave the dining hall, possibly forever. “Yeah,” she said, and made sure to push her chair in neatly on the way out.

***

“May.” A pause. Then, louder: “ _May_.”

May blinked against the fabric of her sleep mask, confused, then sat upright as she pushed it off her face. In the process, she almost bumped heads with her roommate, who had leaned over her bed like some kind of goblin. The streetlight caught her hair through the window, and her teeth gleamed.

“What the hell,” asked May.

“I figured it out,” Olivia said. “Part seven section two B, I figured it out. Get up, I need you to look at this.” There was a piece of paper being shoved under May’s nose. She looked around the room, baffled, and found a good seventy percent of the horizontal surfaces covered in drifts of scratch paper. The whole scene seemed faintly aglow, almost moonlit. Olivia had been working in the dark.

“What the hell,” May asked again.

“We’ve been thinking in terms of time this whole project, but here we should have been thinking in terms of _space_. If you do a Fourier transform, and look at the functions in the frequency domain—”

“Stop talking about the project,” May said. “What time is it?”

“No, you’re not listening, we can’t think about it in terms of time—” May ignored her, peering around at the alarm clock on her desk. She catches sight of it and suppressed a scream.

“What the hell, Olivia, it’s _four o’clock in the morning_.”

Olivia stopped where she’d been pacing around the room and looked up, confused. “Okay? So you agree about the Fourier transform? Because I’m going to have to go the the library to find a table to compute the inverse, and they don’t open until seven today, which means we have time to—”

“ _Shut up_.”

“Ex _cuse_ me?”

“Shut up! Shut up about the project! Shut up at four in the morning! You are driving me _insane_. Do you know how much time we’ve already spent on this compared to other people? Compared to people who are stupider than us? It’s completely absurd, and if you don’t leave me alone during normal sleeping hours, I am going to freak out completely, I swear to God.”

For a person who was being yelled at, Olivia seemed undeterred. In fact, she scoffed. “Like you don’t want an A-plus on this as badly as I do. Come on, be serious.”

“No one gets an A-plus! No one even gets an A! What are you even _talking_ about!”

“Untrue,” Olivia said. “Three years ago, there was this guy named Adrian who—”

“This guy named Adrian who _what_? Who cares? What does it matter?” Talking to Olivia was like being trapped in a house of mirrors, or some sort of parallel dimension where all of the angles were slightly off-kilter, and where things that guys named Adrian supposedly did three years ago had any bearing on what May should do at four in the morning. “Can you please, just once, just be normal about this.”

“What are you, my _dad_?”

“What does your dad have to do with this! Olivia, I am _so tired_. I have given up so much for this, and it’s just a term project. I have sacrificed my _sleep_. I have sacrificed my _time_. My relationship has suffered—”

“This thing with you and time! And boys! Oh my god, _straight girls_ —”

“I never said I was straight!”

There was a long pause. Olivia froze mid-turn, one foot hovering comically in the air. She blinked owlishly at May from behind her glasses, and May stared back, nonplussed. It was something she had never—it wasn’t something she’d ever thought too hard about. There wasn’t a coordinated decision-making process, some kind of select committee on Whether Or Not May Reilly Was Straight. It felt right, though, when the words came out of her. It felt true. May opened her mouth to say something further, and just then, there was a banging on the wall.

“Um, guys?” called Paige. It might have been Jennifer. “You’re being really loud? And I have to be up for practice in forty-two minutes.” Wordlessly, May pulled down her sleep mask and turned over to face the wall. She listened to the sound of Olivia rummaging around for a long time.

***

They did not get an A+ on the project.

They did, however, get an A.


	3. a dance of differentials

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You have a, uh, visitor,” Linsdey said, and pointed unnecessarily. Among the couch’s many deficiencies was its length, and Olivia hung off on three sides.
> 
> “‘Sup,” Olivia said, a heavily annotated copy of a journal article held three inches from her nose.
> 
> “Hey,” May said warily. The appeal of talking to Olivia about anything was dimmed somewhat by the actual physical presence of Olivia.

May arrived on campus the next September a single woman. She and Noah had broken up for a neat linear combination of reasons: the distance between their respective schools divided by the intensity of their desires to overcome it, plus the decreasing length of their phone calls over the increasing number of other potential partners, all amounting to a relationship that neither of them could reasonably expect to last. May, having finally ended it, wouldn’t have felt any angst whatsoever had the breakup not coincided with a series of bouts against her mother over May’s “direction,” as indicated by her recent behavior (“sulking”). May suspected the root problem was that she was nineteen and it wasn’t 1965 anymore, but this did not prevent her from feeling insane with anger every time she and her mom spoke for more than three minutes, nor did it prevent her father’s concern and alarm. The only family member positively impacted was June, who was suddenly getting away with a lot of shit.

The only odd thing about the breakup and the fighting, really, had been that the only person May wanted to tell about it was Olivia.

May moved into apartment-style housing with Lindsey, the other two sides of their quadrangle formed by Jennifer and Paige, who seemed to have forgiven each other during the swim and dive summer session and were once again joined at the hip. Luckily, they also either hadn’t heard the whole “not straight” middle-of-the-night-yelling thing, or had decided to be cool about it, which would make sense because they played sports. Tracey and Charlie moved their two-month relationship into an ill-advised off-campus housing situation specifically to make Tracey’s father mad, and Ben lived in his fraternity house. It was one of those nerd fraternities where their main asset was row upon row of neatly-curated study materials for every gen ed course, but it was a frat nonetheless, and May was embarrassed to be seen on Fraternity Row and thus never visited.

Olivia had disappeared, presumably into the vortex of random roommate assignments. She was in a few of May’s classes, of course, and May kept catching glimpses of her hair or the line of her shoulder from across the room. They went out for coffee, once, May’s idea, and talked over the syllabus for their Modern Physics seminar. May took hers black, and Olivia ordered it the same way, grimacing her way through determined sips at regular intervals before it even had a chance to cool down. They didn’t talk other than that, which was why May was surprised when she opened her door one afternoon to find the totality of Olivia draped across her shitty couch.

“You have a, uh, visitor,” Linsdey said, and pointed unnecessarily. Among the couch’s many deficiencies was its length, and Olivia hung off on three sides.

“‘Sup,” Olivia said, a heavily annotated copy of a journal article held three inches from her nose.

“Hey,” May said warily. The appeal of talking to Olivia about anything was dimmed somewhat by the actual physical presence of Olivia. 

“Silvio is a dick,” Olivia said. Silvio had the misfortune of TAing one of their shared classes again this semester, and his relationship with Olivia had yet to blossom. “Do you have the page numbers and questions for the Experimental Physics problem set?”

“Would he not give them to you?” May asked, slightly alarmed by the potential miscarriage of academic justice.

“I banged on the office door, he wouldn’t come out,” Olivia grumbled. May laughed despite herself, and Lindsey’s dressage-straight posture seemed to relax slightly, like she was no longer afraid that Olivia would hit someone or break something or strip naked and start singing opera.

“Let me find it for you,” May offered, swinging her backpack off to rummage for the appropriate accordion folder (a last gift from Noah, and actually pretty useful).

“I got your room number from the housing office,” Olivia said abruptly. “That’s where my work-study is this semester. Sorry if that’s. Weird.”

May’s hands stilled briefly, then continued flipping pages. That was more personal information than Olivia had ever volunteered before, and the first time she had ever apologized. “That’s not weird,” May tendered, even though it kind of was. “Lindsey was here, and you knocked.”

“Actually, she didn’t knock,” said Lindsey.

“Here,” May said, settling on the correct sheet of paper and holding it out. “That should have everything for the semester—you can take it, I already copied it onto my desk calendar.”

Olivia leveraged herself up off the couch and grabbed the list of assignments from May, shoving it into her jacket pocket. She stood there a beat too long, just long enough for May to wonder whether there was something else she wanted.

“Sick,” Olivia said instead, “bye,” and walked out the door.

“What the hell was that about?” Lindsey asked.

“I have no idea,” May wondered, but after that it was like a damn had burst. Suddenly, May and Olivia talked all the time.

***

It started with Olivia sitting next to her in her classes, which May didn’t mind nearly so much as she would have guessed. May had friends in the physics department, obviously; she was acquainted with the people around her, and she had study groups and project partners and people who tended to sit in her general vicinity. But maybe she wouldn’t have called them friends, actually, so much as acquaintances. Liv she could whisper wry comments to when Professor Xi inevitably let a simple math error propagate across the board until he was lost in a hedge maze of crammed-in denominators and negative signs that had been turned into redundant positives. Liv would walk with her out of class until the point where the sidewalk split two ways around Huorn Quad, and do a dead-on impression of their stumbling TA and his long-suffering partner. Liv very rarely paid full attention in class, it turned out, filled her notebooks with scribbles and sometimes fell asleep, but she never seemed to miss anything. May’s own notes deteriorated until she realized it was happening and began to employ the Cornell method with renewed vigor.

“Oh my god, Olivia, shhh, he’ll _hear_ you,” May whisper-yelled one day after class, as Olivia roundly lambasted their professor’s perspective on the role of the scientific advisor in the public decision-making process, which wasn’t even _on_ the syllabus. To May’s surprise, Olivia shut up.

“You know,” she said, uncharacteristically quietly, “my friends call me Liv, mostly.”

“Oh,” May said. Olivia was messing with the loose edge of the aisle carpeting with the toe of her boot. May had never heard anyone call her Liv. Reaching for the right response, she asked: “Can I call you Liv?”

“Sure,” Liv said, smiling a bit, and that was that.

***

Liv spent a lot of time sprawled across May’s couch, freaking out May’s friends a little bit, which was in turn a source of tension. Lindsey was just a bit baffled, while Jennifer and Paige, who clearly thought they were beyond the Liv portion of their lives and on to the part where they never had to speak to her again, were actively annoyed. 

“ _Feet!_ ” Paige shrieked one day upon entering the apartment and seeing that Liv had her boots kicked up on the coffee table. Jennifer had acquired from a guy she met at the park, who insisted on coming up to the dorm to drop it off personally but to everyone’s surprise turned out not to be a murderer. It wasn’t that nice of a coffee table, and Paige herself put her feet on it all the time. 

“May?” Liv called, lolling her head back in the direction of where May was attempting to rewire the mini fridge in order to achieve a temperature appropriate for storing Lean Cuisines and vodka. “Your roommate’s an asshole, can we go hang out with my friends?”

“Your what?” May asked.

Liv, it turned out, had friends. She was even friends with the person she lived with, a scary-looking girl with short hair and black lipstick named Moonbeam. 

“I am _not_. A _hippie_ ,” Moonbeam said immediately upon being introduced.

“I did not assume you were,” May said honestly. 

“My _parents_ were hippies. We’re way beyond that,” said Moonbeam. May did not personally feel she was beyond hippies. It was possible she had not even gotten _to_ hippies yet. 

“May’s cool, though,” Liv said, and Moonbeam shrugged. She was nearly as wide as the doorway, broad-shouldered and thick-waisted, but she stepped aside and let May in.

Liv’s dorm room was, as expected, a disaster. It was the same setup as May and Liv’s old room, but without the bulwark of May’s neatness to hold back the tide of Hurricane Olivia. Unlike in their old room, however, the mess seemed like a natural part of the ecosystem. Liv had at some point obtained a wall’s worth of posters for bands May didn’t know, a beanbag chair that looked like it had been stolen from the library, and, May was pleased to see, a real blanket. For the first time, May felt uncool in Liv’s presence.

“Did you crack it yet?” Moonbeam said. 

“Sorry?” May asked, alarmed, and Moonbeam rolled her eyes. 

“The secret code,” she said, and cut her eyes to the posters. May realized she had been staring for far too long, and laughed a little, some kind of tension easing in her chest. 

“Not yet,” she said, “but I’m getting there.”

***

Moonbeam, it turned out, was the coolest. She was an English major (“What a waste,” Liv mourned) with an incredibly wry sense of humor, an unexpected green thumb, and absolutely no time for May’s opinions whatsoever. She was the vice-president of the gardening club, and when she was feeling charitable she would let May come along when she and Liv went up to smoke cigarettes in the rooftop garden on top of the biology building. 

Liv’s other friends were Sumaya, a generally unassuming pre-med student who would sometimes get inexplicably angry and refuse to speak to anyone for several days, and Rob, a Music Education major even tinier than May. Rob’s older brother on the football team supplied all their alcohol in exchange for never having to be seen with him in public. May’s mother would have called them odd ducks. May liked them, and hung out with them all every couple of weeks or so, to her increasing delight and comfort. They each seemed to have a collection of satellite friends who travelled in their orbits, occasionally swinging by whatever delinquent activity someone had come up with that evening. May was startled to realize that if she thought about it in terms of orbits, she was in Liv’s. 

***

On a Thursday night that found May and Liv lying on the grody dorm carpet in Liv’s place and testing a conjecture (“there exists a nonzero amount of whiskey that, consumed orally, will maximize our ability to complete Linear Algebra problem sets”), Liv abruptly turned to face May. “Did you mean it?” she asked.

May thought her way back to their previous topic of conversation, which she had lost the thread of somewhere in the bottom of the shitty plastic cups from the math department’s open house. “Yeah,” she decided, “I think I’d be a great water polo player. I can, you know,” and made a gesture to indicate the general concept of floating.

“No, no, I mean. Did you mean it about not straight?”

May picked at the fabric of her sweater where it had pilled from rubbing against the carpet. “Why?” she asked.

“I mean,” Liv said, and let her foot fall from where it was propped up against her desk chair with a thud. “You know I’m a lesbian, right?”

“Yeah, I know,” May said. She had never had a lesbian friend before, but she had picked up on it even before she started hanging out with Moonbeam and Sumaya and Rob and it became explicitly clear.

“So!” Liv exclaimed.

“So what?”

“So what are you?”

May sat up, drawing herself in a cross-legged position. She didn’t have an answer prepared—given that she was a tiny blonde who stumblingly flirted with boys at house parties and owned a pink floral bedspread, she didn’t have to field a lot of inquiries about her sexuality. But the room felt warm and slightly disconnected, and Liv was looking up at her from the ground. May realized quite suddenly that there were things she wanted to say.

“I don’t really know,” she began, tilting her head back to rest against Moonbeam’s bed frame. “I mean, I wouldn’t say I’m _not_ straight, but I also wouldn’t say I _am_ straight, if that makes sense?”

“No,” Liv said.

“I don’t know, I just. I feel like I don’t really have the words to say what I’m thinking.”

Liv cleared her throat slightly. “So there’s this thing called bisexuality…”

“No, I know that. I mean, I guess that’s probably right. But I just used to know what I was feeling most of the time? Or at least I thought I knew. But now I hardly ever know, and I just. I don’t know. It gets all tangled up in my head. The doubt, and stuff.”

Liv considered her, eyes flitting across her face. “I don’t really feel that way,” she said.

“Yeah, I figured,” May told her.

“But I guess. It’s cool,” Liv ventured. “Not-not-not straight.” May laughed despite herself. “What do you say when your mom asks?”

“I’m focusing on my career right now,” May said primly, and Liv snorted whiskey up her nose.


	4. the vibrations of the strings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That Christmas, May bought Liv a scarf. She didn’t think much of it, beyond the fact that she was the kind of woman who bought gifts for her friends and it irritated her to no end that Liv was still wearing the same, completely inadequate, winter clothing. The scarf was rainbow. Liv was extremely weird about it.

That Christmas, May bought Liv a scarf. She didn’t think much of it, beyond the fact that she was the kind of woman who bought gifts for her friends and it irritated her to no end that Liv was still wearing the same, completely inadequate, winter clothing. The scarf was rainbow. Liv was extremely weird about it.

“What are you,” she said, wrapping the scarf around and around her hands. “What are you doing? Why are you doing this?”

“For… Christmas?” May tried. “I know it’s not for a couple weeks, but the weather’s right for it, and it’s not like we’ll be together on the holiday anyway.” In a split second, May realized what her faux pas might have been. “I’m sorry, do you not celebrate Christmas? I shouldn’t have assumed—”

“I celebrate Christmas,” Liv said, her voice twisting sharply around _celebrate_ like it meant something else.

“Okay, good,” May said. “So we’re good?”

“But I didn’t,” Olivia started. “I didn’t get _you_ a scarf.”

“Well, I have a scarf, so that seems fine,” May told her.

After that, Liv didn’t talk to May for a week, including in class, where they sat directly next to each other. Just as May was considering giving up on their entire friendship as some sort of calculus-induced fever dream, Liv showed up at her door at 9 p.m. on a Friday.

“Hey, come out with us,” she said. She had been knocking on the door like she was trying to batter it down, and was out of breath but trying to conceal it. She was also wearing the scarf.

“Out where? Us who?” May asked.

“Out to Chelsea. Me, Sumaya, Moonbeam, Rob, us-us. Come on, put on whatever it is you need to put on.”

May looked down at her pajama set. She and Lindsey had been planning to borrow Ben’s VCR and watch _Real Genius_ , but May was pretty sure Lindsey wasn’t going to appreciate it properly. Besides, Liv had worn the scarf. “Okay,” she said. “Give me five minutes.”

“Does that mean fifteen?” Liv asked.

“Yes.”

***

They rode the subway up to 23rd Street. It had been dark for hours, so it felt later than it was. The car was neither empty nor full. Moonbeam sat down between two men in dark suits and Rob settled into her lap like it was the most natural thing in the world. She put her arms around his waist. Sumaya took a free seat halfway down the car, headphones over her ears, bobbing along to something. Liv hung onto one of the metal poles, the horizontal ones that May could never reach comfortably, and May planted herself nearby and listened to their conversation.

“We need to come into the city more,” Moonbeam was saying.

“We live in the city,” Rob said.

“Being on campus is not being in the city. We’re going to get stuck in a rut,” Moonbeam argued.

“I was in the city last weekend,” Liv said.

“For that physics talk? If it’s for a physics talk it doesn’t count.”

“Yes it does.”

“No, physics talks definitely don’t count,” Rob said, arbitrating. “They have those on campus.”

“What physics talk?” May asked. She was slightly hurt that she, the physics friend, was the one who had not been told about the physics talk, even if it was during the period that Liv was inexplicably not speaking to her.

Liv turned full-body to face her, frame swaying with the motion of the car, eyes alight. “ _Wilson Fisk_ ,” she said.

“Now you’ve done it,” said Moonbeam.

“Wake me up when we get there,” said Rob.

“The guy from the startup?” May asked.

“Wilson Fisk is a genius,” Liv enthused. “He’s going to change the world. The universe, probably. May, how have we not talked about this?”

May thought back to the internship seminar that the Fisk Company had had a table at. It was flashy, slick, but she couldn’t remember anything that distinguished the tech or the mission, particularly. “Isn’t he a businessman, more than anything else? Underestimates how long it’s going to take fusion to reach breakeven by several decades?”

Liv was shaking her head wildly. “It’s about the ways he’s structured the company. He’s willing to move forward with ideas faster than anyone else, he’s not afraid to break things and start over—everything is secondary to what the technical experts think, and he’s recruiting real talent. It’s the closest you can get to pure science in our fucked-up economy. He’s not bound by—”

“Labor laws?” Moonbeam asked. “Workplace safety? Remember when he was cited for—”

“That’s irrelevant to—”

A loud screech of the brakes, and Liv, who had let go of the pole to gesticulate, was knocked off-balance.

“We’re here!” Rob said loudly and cheerfully. He hopped up and linked his arm through May’s. “Everybody off the train, let’s talk about literally anything else in the world.”

***

There was a twenty-four hour diner near the subway stop, and they all piled into a booth by the front windows. The waitress, who, based on her expression, may have been plotting to poison them already, plopped a stack of menus down on the table and vanished into the back. Rob dragged one towards himself by the corner and flipped it open. It took up half the table, from Moonbeam on his right to Sumaya on his left.

“Given five dollars for the ticket and one for the subway back, I can afford— fries,” he said, rapidly scanning the columns.

“We can afford pizza if we split it,” Moonbeam told him.

“You mean you can afford most of a pizza, and I can cover some scraps of crust.”

“You eat like a bird anyway.”

“Between the five of us we can make two pizzas appear,” Liv said. “It’ll be fine.”

“They have to have olives or I’m not helping,” Sumaya said. May, who had been eyeing the Greek food section of the menu, was coming to the uncomfortable realization that she might be the only one with anything resembling disposable income.

“We can negotiate on the olives,” Moonbeam said. “Someone without an opinion should go buy tickets now though, I don’t want them to sell out.”

“I can do it,” May offered. She was already trying to work out how to subtly defray the cost of tickets.

“No!” Liv said. It was more of a yell: the waitress, who had returned with five big plastic cups of water, almost spilled the one she was setting down. “No, I’m going to do it.”

“You hate olives,” Moonbeam said warningly.

“Let her do it, otherwise I’ll have to,” said Rob, waving a five in Liv’s direction. Liv collected cash from Moonbeam and Sumaya as well, and then flatly refused to take May’s proffered money.

“I invited you,” Liv said.

“ _I_ invited _you_ ,” said Moonbeam. “Doesn’t mean I’m paying.”

“She’s new,” Liv argued.

“I’m a freshman,” Rob pointed out.

“It’s really fine,” May began. “I’m happy to—”

“It’s a Christmas present!” Liv said finally. “Oh my god, just— let it be a Christmas present!”

May looked around at the group. Moonbeam’s face was impassive and Sumaya looked vaguely pissed off, which didn’t tell her anything. Rob was trying and failing to conceal glee, which was alarming but not clarifying. May turned back towards Liv. She looked determined, but more vulnerable than May could ever remember seeing her. Even though it was warm indoors, she hadn’t taken off the scarf.

“Okay,” May said. “I— thank you.”

Liv looked strangely relieved as she turned to go. The bell clanged behind her, May stared for a bit at the space she used to occupy.

“So are you guys ready to order or what,” the waitress said, and May jumped.

“No,” said Sumaya. “What kinds of olives do you have?”

***

After pizza (one olive, one pepperoni—May, who quite liked olives, had found herself launching a vigorous attack against them), they went to the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which May was tangentially familiar with but had never seen.

“Any virgins?” a staff member asked, the moment they walked through the door of the theater.

“Just her,” Moonbeam said, jerking her head at May.

May stopped in her tracks, poleaxed. As she was gearing up to— object? complain? storm out?, Moonbeam rolled her eyes and said, “It’s your first time, right? At the show?”

“Oh,” May said, and Rob snickered. In the corner, a man in a blond wig and pink dress and a woman with wild red hair and a maid’s uniform started shouting at each other.

“Not again,” the staff member muttered. “Could you guys mark her? I have to deal with this.”

“Sure,” Moonbeam said, and pulled a tube of what looked like eye black out of her jacket pocket. “May, hold still.”

“Um,” May said, eyeing the tube as it approached like it was a snake in the grass.

“No, no,” Sumaya said. “Your lipstick sucks, use mine.” From her shoulder bag, she pulled her own tube and uncapped it. It was bright pink, a color May had never once seen on Sumaya. “Close your eyes.”

May did, and she only flinched a little when something brushed her face. Gently, carefully, Sumaya drew what felt like a large V across her forehead. May thought, absurdly, of Ash Wednesday. She opened her eyes to see her friends grouped loosely around her, watching. Hyperaware of her own forehead, she asked, “How do I look?”

“Ready,” Rob said. “Come on, let’s go get seats.”

***

The show was great fun. May started out nervous: just before midnight, she was herded away from her friends with the rest of the lipsticked virgins, who were on the whole costumed at a rate and with an enthusiasm far below that of the average showgoer. They were all lined up at the front of the theater, right below the screen, and the host—the movie had a host—introduced the film, and then told the man on the far right to give everyone his name and his very best orgasm noise.

May’s stomach dropped.

Luckily, she was about two-thirds of the way down the line, so she had time to come to terms with her new reality. By the time the man to her right, who had attempted some kind of dying cat sound that caused horrible squealing feedback, handed her the microphone, she was as ready as she’d ever be.

There was a spotlight pointed in her direction. It was very bright. “I’m May Reilly,” she told the room, her voice cracking only a little on _Reilly_. “Here I go.”

She had decided to try something— breathy was the word, probably. A little weak, but not an active assault on the ears. It was, in fact, the most embarrassing thing she had ever done. Someone in the crowd whooped. It sounded like Rob; she squinted a little to try and catch a glimpse of her friends. Liv looked pained to know her, but Moonbeam, Sumaya, and Rob were all cackling. Grinning just a little despite herself, she brought her portion of the show to a close.

After some further heckling, she and the rest of the newly-deflowered were released. She headed for the seat her friends had saved for her, and Liv carefully pulled her knees up to her chest to let May pass down the aisle without touching her. The rest of the lights went down, and she relaxed.

Rocky Horror was the strangest movie May had ever seen. There was a live cast, who appeared to be just—acting out the movie, in sync with the movie. Between them, May’s friends produced toast, rice, a roll of toilet paper and a newspaper, all of which were leveraged at various points during the film. They were not the only or even the most-prepared audience members—some people had noisemakers, confetti, and full costumes—but they clearly knew the established call and response phrases, even if they weren’t trying new ones like the guy in the back corner who was intermittently cheered and booed. 

At one point, everyone got to their feet, and May looked over to see Liv singing and dancing, elbows and knees pointed in wild directions. She was objectively terrible at it. It was wonderful.

By the time the show ended, it was properly the middle of the night. May was riding a weird and warm high, feet barely touching the cracked sidewalk on the way back to the station. They got about halfway there before she realized she left her coat in the theater, draped over the back of her seat. They went back for it, but New York being what it was the coat was long gone. The night air cut cold, and May shivered, settling back into reality. Liv reached out and tucked her neatly under her arm. They walked home that way, first to the station and then all the way to the door of May’s building.

Back in the confines of her room, she tucked the crumpled ticket Liv had handed her safely into the corner of her vanity mirror.

***

The next semester, May still did almost all of her usual stuff. She spent an absurd number of hours on problem sets. She and Lindsey watched movies and painted their nails, and she called her mother every week and set aside time specifically to get dinner with Ben. She went to her first swim and dive meet to cheer on Jennifer and Paige, and participated in the rumor mill when Charlie and Tracey dropped out of school to elope. (They wound up breaking up instead, and so had to grovel to the registrar _and_ the housing office in order to re-enroll and also move rooms off-cycle. The whole thing cost a ton of money, and Tracey’s dad was _furious_. Tracey was delighted.)

Other times, though, May was in Liv’s room, or with Liv’s friends, who were _her_ friends. They talked about politics in a way that May had never heard before and frankly felt a little lost in, but she knew enough to chime in with a groan every time Liv mentioned Wilson Fisk. She smoked weed for the first time and hated it, though she had to admit it seemed to be doing Liv a lot of good. They almost came to blows once when Noah, whom May had mostly forgiven for being nineteen years old and a shit and Liv hated on principle, came up. This was made up for the way Rob high-fived her the first time she tentatively mentioned how good Linda Hamilton looked in _The Terminator_. Once, Liv ended a story with “And my dad, you know,” and everyone in the room nodded and affirmed, leaving May feeling not just a little but _hopelessly_ lost.

At the end of the semester, Liv came to say goodbye. May was going down to D.C. for the summer to intern in a government lab, and just as she was leaving New York for the first time, Liv was staying. She had a research assistantship with the Fisk Company, which had opened up a satellite campus right in the middle of Brooklyn. May’s understanding was the the job had something to do with nuclear reactors. Liv was so excited.

“I’m going to miss you,” May said, in a sudden fit of honest feeling. They were standing on the sidewalk outside May’s building. Liv had her duffel over her shoulder, and May, on her way to the gym, had almost missed her. She hated the idea of almost missing her.

Liv grinned all crooked-like. “I— yeah,” she said. “You too. Good luck this summer.”

“Thanks,” May told her. “You too.”

“You don’t need it, though,” Liv said suddenly. “The government doesn’t deserve you.”

“Yeah?” May asked. She felt almost giddy. It was the closest Liv had ever come to telling her she was smart.

“Yeah,” Liv said. “They’re no Fisk Company.” Then she smiled for real, and May, following a rare gut instinct, wrapped her arms around her waist. Liv froze, surprised, before tentatively settling her hands on May’s back.

It was nice.

They stood there for a while, spring breeze blowing across the patchy grass. Eventually, May let go and stepped back. Liv cleared her throat.

“Come back and see me the second you’re back on campus,” she said, with an urgency May was still getting used to. “I’ll have a lot to tell you.”

“I’m sure you will,” May said. She stood and watched, gym trip forgotten, as Liv resettled her duffel over her shoulder and then walked away, a tall figure caught by the sunlight as she cut her way down the sidewalk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the record if i update a fic for the first time in three months it's probably bc i have a VERY important presentation tomorrow i haven't actually finished
> 
> may and liv would understand i think

**Author's Note:**

> questions, comments, and kudos are always appreciated—there is up-to-date contact info in my profile, come say hi!
> 
> Grace is a wonderful, lovely human and beta reader, and can be found [here](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gracelesso/pseuds/gracelesso/works).
> 
> "Standard Deviation" is a song by Danny Schmidt, and the source of all chapter titles.


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